Best Daylight bulbs with high CRI and high lumen/$ ratio

I’m new to this forum (and lighting in general), and I’m looking for LED lights with the following requirements:

  • Replicates daylight very well in SPD (I think this naturally correlates with high CRI?)
  • Doesn’t have too high of a spike in HEV blue light, for eye health purposes. (I know that this topic is controversial and studies are not conclusive, but I’d like to err on the side of caution.)
  • Has high lumens/$ ratio, since I’d like to possibly buy 10-20 of these bulbs (along with splitters) to get the intensity of sunlight in the home (kind of like anti-SAD lighting).

If this question has already been answered elsewhere in the forum, please let me know.

I did find this review by @maukka that has a high opinion of Waveform Home/Daylight 4000k/5000k bulbs. Is there anything better than this?

Thanks.

There is also SunLike which is run by a member of this forum going by that username. maukka has reviews of some of his products up as well.

If you do go with Waveform make sure you pick the flicker-free version - I also have of theirs that isn’t and the flicker can be very noticeable (it’s relegated to a less-used fixture now).

It seems that SunLike is pretty highly-reviewed but the cost per lumen is quite high.

Do any of you use bulbs like these to create tens of thousands of lumens for anti-SAD lighting?

I’m actually looking to create SAD lighting panels, just holding out to see how the new 2835 Sunlike chips perform in the next couple weeks.

Then doing an analysis on Sunlike 3030 vs Sunlike 2835 vs larger Sunlike COBs vs Optisolis as far as emitters go.

I’m not an expert in lighting; are you making your own lighting panels from the raw underlying chips (2835 Sunlike, 3030 Sunlike)?

So you aren’t talking about buying products from sunlikelamp?

He also sells individual SMDs & COBs, as well as PCBs in a number of different shapes. I’d love to see him produce a flexible strip like this:

But in any case, yes I’m going to find a combination of the above that works for this application. The thing that sent me down this path years ago was the youtube videos by DIYPerks, making DIY LED panels.

For Anti-SAD lighting, couldn’t you just buy something like this? SunLike48-54LD IP67 светодиодная лампа

It looks like it’s ~50W, which seems like it would be ~4k lumens. If you get a couple of these, you’d approach 10-30k lumens.

Or are you just looking to build it yourself to be cheaper?

Great questions. You’re correct that the bar you linked to could be helpful by itself. I’m looking to spread out the light source(s) to simulate a window and/or skylight, and I’d like to be able to simulate not just daylight, but a range of color temps.

I mapped out the concept in a post from a while back. Warning, it’s a bit wordy :innocent:

What a coincidence! DIY Perks published a video about a similar project on Oct 31, 2020.

DIY Perks: Building an artificial sun that looks unbelievably realistic…

If you prefer something you could put together in 5 minutes, you could get a softbox lighting kit and a 4 pack of YujiLights™ High CRI 95+ LED Corn Bulb E27 36W G02 5600K for Studio Softbox.
https://store.yujiintl.com/products/high-cri-95-led-corn-bulb-e27-36w-g02-3200k-5600k-for-studio-softbox

Lensvid did this and they wrote a blog post about it.

Lensvid: Super High CRI LED Bulb Review (Yugi Lights 36W Bulbs)

If you do this, you could probably tint mix 2x 3200K and 2x 5600K to get 4400K with rosy tint.